The Moth Collector’s Room

The house on Hemlock Lane was a Victorian relic, its gingerbread trim rotting like old teeth. My sister and I called it the Moth House, because every summer, hundreds of pale wings would batter against the porch light, leaving dusty smears on the glass. We moved there when I was eight, after Dad got a job at the paper mill. The previous tenants, a family with two daughters, had fled to California, according to the realtor, who would not meet our eyes when she said it.

My room was at the top of the stairs, down a narrow hallway lined with faded floral wallpaper. It had a slanted ceiling and a window that overlooked the overgrown garden. The first night, I lay in bed staring at the dark shapes of moths pressed against the screen, their wings the color of dried blood. I didn’t sleep much.

The worst part was the closet. It was shallow but deep, and someone had painted the inside with a mural of a forest at dusk. The trees were black silhouettes, and between them, tiny faces peered out—not human, but not quite animal. They had wide, unblinking eyes. I covered it with a bedsheet, but I could still feel them watching.

One afternoon, I found a loose floorboard under the radiator. Beneath it was a tin box, rusted shut. I pried it open with a screwdriver and found a collection of moth wings, each pinned to a card with a handwritten label in a looping script. The dates spanned from 1942 to 1965, but the last card simply said, ‘For the collection.’ I didn’t touch it again.

That night, I dreamed of the closet. The sheet had fallen, and the painted faces had moved closer to the surface, their mouths open in silent screams. I woke with a start, my heart pounding, and saw a moth the size of my hand clinging to the ceiling above my head. Its wings were patterned like eyes—dozens of them, all staring at me. I didn’t move until dawn.

The next day, I told my sister about the mural. She laughed and said I was letting the house get to me. But that evening, when I went to close my closet door, I saw the sheet had been pulled away. The painting was different. The trees had grown gnarled, and in the center of the forest, a figure stood—a woman in a long dress, her face obscured by a cloud of moths. I slammed the door shut and didn’t open it again for a week.

It was my sister who broke the silence. She came to my room one night, pale, holding a candle. ‘There’s something in my closet,’ she whispered. ‘It keeps scratching.’ We stood in the hallway, listening to the sound of tiny claws on wood, like a trapped animal. But when we opened her door, the closet was empty. That’s when we heard the scratching from my room.

We ran downstairs to tell Dad, but he was asleep in his recliner, the TV flickering static. We shook him awake, and he grumbled, ‘It’s just mice. Go back to bed.’ But we couldn’t. We sat on the kitchen floor, huddled together, until the scratching stopped.

In the morning, I found the tin box empty. The wings were gone, scattered across the floor like fallen leaves. And the mural in my closet had changed again. The woman was now closer, her face partially revealed, and she was holding a lantern. In its glow, I could see her mouth was open, as if calling out. I heard it then, a faint humming, like a distant choir of moths.

I begged my parents to let us move, but they said the house was fine, that we were just imaginative. So I took matters into my own hands. I found a can of white paint in the garage and covered the mural, layer after layer, until the faces were just bumps in the wall. The humming stopped. For a while.

Years later, when I was thirteen and we finally moved to a brick house in town, I thought I’d left it behind. But last night, I woke to find a moth on my pillow, its wings patterned like eyes. It flew to the window and perched on the glass, and I saw the reflection of my own room behind me—but it wasn’t my room. It was the Moth House, the hallway stretching long, and at the end, the closet door was open. A figure stood inside, holding a lantern, her mouth open, calling me home.

I don’t sleep anymore. And I’ve started collecting things—small, delicate things—to keep them safe. The moths know. They always know.